Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 18:03:01 +0200 (CEST) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> Subject: Re: Why?? (prog question) Message-ID: <200904021603.n32G31dX028569@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <20090401223940.949ab0ee.freebsd@edvax.de>
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Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> wrote:
> Oliver Fromme wrote:
> > [...]
> What's bad is when several styles are mixed, e. g.
Of course. I don't think anyone disagrees with that.
> > I assume that every modern editor can be configured that
> > way.
>
> Even "old fashioned" ones can, take the mcedit (Midnight Commander
> Editor) and joe (Joe's own editor) into mind. I think even the
> simple vi can.
Uhm. I wouldn't call joe "old fashioned". It has a long
history, but it's not older than, say, BSD. Would you call
BSD old fashioned?
> > No, that won't work. In practice you will either have to
> > adopt the original indentation style, or reformat the
> > code. Just changing the tab size in your editor will
> > break many things.
>
> Maybe I expressed in an unelegant way: When tabs are used,
> you can set the tab width to your individual preferences.
Yes, you can, and it will break the appearance of many
files. See the stdio.h example.
> If spaces are used, you cannot do this anymore, you have to
> live with the spaces ("corporate guideline").
You can easily convert <n> spaces to <m> spaces. It's
trivial to do in sed or with a vi command, or whatever.
The effect is the same as changing the tab width on a
file that uses tabs (and it can also cause a mess).
So it's no worse and no better.
I have once written a small shell script that does a
somewhat better job:
http://www.secnetix.de/olli/scripts/reindent
For example, it can be used to change the indentation
on stdio.h from 8 to 4 without destroying the alignment
of comments and other things:
$ reindent 8 4 /usr/include/stdio.h | less
It doesn't matter whether the input uses tabs or spaces.
The output will always use spaces, but of course you can
pipe it through "unexpand -t4" or similar if you prefer.
> My two examples above, joe and mcedit: Going forth and back
> in indentation would require one keypress per space character,
> in opposite to one keypress per tab (which equals one indentation
> level).
>
> But again, they don't count as serious editors, do they? :-)
I don't know mcedit, but joe _does_ support transparent
handling of indentation with spaces. I use it all the
time. I don't have to perform more keypresses if a
file uses spaces instead of tab characters.
In fact, I think that joe is no less (nor more) serious
than vi and emacs.
> Well, joe was my first Linux and then FreeBSD editor, and it
> got a lot of new features (such as code highlighting). If
> you are familiar with TP / WS key codes (^KB ^KK ^KM ^KE
> ^KX ^TZ and so forth), it's a real powerful editor.
Yes, it is, and the keyboard functions are fully
customizable. My own ~/.joerc is 25 KByte, and it
doesn't have much in common anymore with the old
TP / WS editors. Things have evolved. :)
> Finally, I'd like to add that I've not always been such
> a "tabbing nazi". In KC-BASIC, my first programming language,
> I didn't use indentation (allthough it was completely
> possible)
Well, I didn't indent in Commodore-BASIC either (used
it on PET-2001, VIC-20, C64), but that language wasn't
very structured anyway. It didn't even support real
functions or procedures, just "GOSUB" subroutines.
And of course, limited memory is an issue: When you
have only 3.5 KB RAM (VIC-20), saving a few spaces
can make a huge difference.
Eventually a bought a 40 KB RAM extension for my VIC-20;
I had to spend 200 DM at that time (and that was after
it had gotten cheap). Today, 1 GB RAM is about 10 Euro.
Ugh.
Best regards
Oliver
--
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M.
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"[...] one observation we can make here is that Python makes
an excellent pseudocoding language, with the wonderful attribute
that it can actually be executed." -- Bruce Eckel
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